A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
@emptysqua.re
Senior Staff Research Engineer in the MongoDB Distributed Systems Research Group. Photographer, Gunks climber, Zen Buddhist. Blog: https://emptysqua.re
PSA: Command Strips never last. Whatever's dear and precious to you will someday fall and smash to pieces.
Chomsky: Recursion is fundamental to producing and parsing language. LLM researchers: Nah, just add more parameters. NY Times: "Colorado Governor Fires Officials Who Opposed Freeing Election Denier."
My dharma talk about my estranged, lying father has been featured in @tricyclemag.bsky.social tricycle.org/article/the-...
The Kid Is Not My Son
Recounting experiences with his estranged father, a Zen student presents a dharma talk on the karma of lying.
tricycle.org
My recap of the SIGMOD 2026 database conference: SIGMOD 2026 recap: emptysqua.re/blog/sigmod-...
SIGMOD 2026 Recap
My notes from the database conference in Bangalore.
emptysqua.re
Trip report: what I saw and did in Bengaluru/Bangalore. I'm waiting in the airport to fly home right now. emptysqua.re/blog/bengalu...
Bengaluru
Trip report of a week in India's tech capital.
emptysqua.re
My review of "Scalable Leader Leases For Multi Consensus Groups in CockroachDB", this one was tough for me to grok. emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
Review: Scalable Leader Leases For Multi Consensus Groups in CockroachDB
A difficult paper about a real cloud database's complex and evolving architecture.
emptysqua.re
No, *this* is what they took from you -- small cars with physical buttons! marc-newson.com/ford-021c-co...
Ford 021C Concept Car | Marc Newson
Marc Newson has been described as one of the most influential designers of his generation. He has worked across an extremely wide range of disciplines, and his clients include some of the best-known a...
marc-newson.com
Nepal trek trip report: photos, videos, daily stats, packing list. emptysqua.re/blog/nepal-t...
Nepal trek
Two days visiting Kathmandu temples, then four days walking up to Poon Hill and down through the Annapurna foothills.
emptysqua.re
Weird stuff going on at the MongoDB NYC office lately....
TLA+ is the gold standard for specifying distributed systems, but the syntax is a bear. This isn't a problem anymore, AI can write specs for you! But you still need to understand temporal logic. Here's a 20-minute intro to TLA+ for the LLM era: emptysqua.re/blog/intro-t...
Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory
You can go far without writing TLA+ syntax now, but you still need to understand temporal logic.
emptysqua.re
My father’s dishonesty was frustrating and disappointing to many people, but I think he got the worst of it. Here’s a dharma talk I gave to New Paltz Zen Center and Village Zendo on May 10, 2026. emptysqua.re/blog/the-kid...
The Kid Is Not My Son
My father's dishonesty was frustrating and disappointing to many people, but I think he got the worst of it.
emptysqua.re
"Nothing is permanent, your printer is low on ink, Chrome will restart in 3 days." --Lord Buddha
Our worst fears have come to pass: AI does all the creative thinking, humans spend our days on two-factor auth.
When are we gonna have Star Peace, man? You ever think about that?
My notes from this year's Antithesis BugBash conference, about software verification and distributed systems: emptysqua.re/blog/notes-f...
Antithesis BugBash Conference 2026
Notes from the 2026 conference on autonomous testing and software correctness.
emptysqua.re
My review of "Automated Design of Agentic Systems", a 2025 paper about agents designing agents: emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
I took some of my favorite Gunks climbing photos on Sunday!
Climbing Retribution in the Gunks
Photos of Tyler leading a slightly stressful 5.10b trad climb.
emptysqua.re
Claude Code + Zotero is an incredible combo for organizing and understanding research papers. This zotero-mcp server was just updated with two patches I made to fix how it handles notes and annotations, try it out: github.com/54yyyu/zoter...
GitHub - 54yyyu/zotero-mcp: Zotero MCP: Connects your Zotero research library with Claude and other AI assistants via the Model Context Protocol to discuss papers, get summaries, analyze citations, an...
Zotero MCP: Connects your Zotero research library with Claude and other AI assistants via the Model Context Protocol to discuss papers, get summaries, analyze citations, and more. - 54yyyu/zotero-mcp
github.com
LeaseGuard: The Movie! Here's a half-hour presentation I gave on the new protocol that enhances Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery, developed with my MongoDB colleagues and published in SIGMOD this year. emptysqua.re/blog/leasegu...
LeaseGuard: The Movie
A half-hour talk about our enhancement to the Raft consensus protocol that strengthens Raft's consistency guarantees and time-to-recovery.
emptysqua.re
Yay, SIGMOD just published the paper I wrote with @muratdemirbas.bsky.social and Lingzhi Deng, it's about strengthening Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery lnkd.in/ef6qUJzw
LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right!
A new Raft enhancement for fast, consistent reads.
emptysqua.re
The portion of people alive today, compared to the dead, is greater than ever before emptysqua.re/blog/the-dea...
The Dead Majority
For how much of history have the dead outnumbered the living, and by how much? And when does that change?
emptysqua.re
AI: can it write a TLA+ spec of existing code? Can it write TLA+ at all? Let's find out! emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
Review: SysMoBench: Evaluating AI on Formally Modeling Complex Real-World Systems
Some TLA+ experts try to teach LLMs to write TLA+. The LLMs fail.
emptysqua.re
What's an AI time horizon, how is it measured, and how fast is it growing? emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
Review: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks
What we talk about when we talk about time horizon.
emptysqua.re
What's it like at BugBash? We think it's great, but you don't have to take it from us. You can hear it from @isaacvando.bsky.social, @eatonphil.bsky.social, and @emptysqua.re instead. A few tickets left.
The New Paltz Zen Center's first meditation retreat, ending with a precepts ceremony for two members!
